Whip Media is an American company that offers data analyzation to entertainment organizations, helping them to know which type of content does well in specific regions and countries. According to Whip Media president Carol Hanley, the company fills a needed niche in the media landscape, as business companies and the content they produce has increasingly become more and more international.
“I spent a few years over at Deluxe Entertainment where we would talk about localization all the time,” Whip Media president Carol Hanley said in the Variety Streaming Room. “It was localization. And toward the end of my time there, we shift over and started talking about, ‘Oh, clients are globalizing.’ Really, it is localizing, but they’re globalizing through the localization. I mean, this has just completely shifted how everybody thinks about content and the way we all look at it as consumers.”
Hanley was joined for a Variety Streaming Room presented by Whip Media by Angela Colla, head of international sales for Globo; Jeff Shultz, chief strategy and business development officer for Paramount Streaming; Lisa Holme, group senior vice president of content and commercial strategy for Discovery; Miquel Penella, president of streaming services for AMC Networks; and Rodrigo Mazón, the executive vice president and general manager of SVOD for TelevisaUnivision. In a conversation with Variety international editor Manori Ravindran, the panelists discussed strategies for globalization and creating content that travels across international borders.
TelevisaUnivision is a recent merger between the Mexican-American media companies Televisa and Univision. During the conversation, Mazón discussed focusing on the Spanish-language world in terms of targeting content and the company’s plan to launch the new streaming service Vix Plus later this year.
“For obvious reasons, our focus is the Spanish-speaking countries, starting in Latin America and the U.S Hispanic market, and then we’ll go to Spain and other parts of Europe, et cetera,” Mazón said during the panel. “And even though there’s a ton of diversity even across all the Spanish-speaking countries, there is also a lot of commonalities culturally that make it advantageous to focus in that space, right? Because even though Mexicans and Colombians and Peruvians and Argentines are all different, there’s cultural aspects that bring them together. What streaming does, and has done, obviously, is provide that scale to be able to invest more into the content and therefore create higher quality content, which is often correlated with things that work better.”
Watch the full conversation above.